In these pages, 17 writers and an editor tell about the city of Naples and try to imagine its future.

Almost like Boccaccio: in the beginning is a garden. A shady, seventeenth-century hortus conclusus in which a group of writers meet to reason about an ancient and every day new theme: Naples. A city of many commonplaces, of many interrupted projects, transited from the oleographic image of postcards to the now mannerist aesthetics of crime narratives. Naples yearns for a normality that eludes it but seems destined to an uncomfortable exceptionality: from time to time it is hoisted to the altars of its poignant beauty and dragged into the dust of the headlines shrieked about its many emergencies. A beautiful siren whose tail fails to turn into solid legs on which to walk into the future. In these pages, 17 writers and an editor try to imagine these legs and this future. They do not deny how Naples is capable of fatiguing those who live there, those who have to tell their stories, those who would like to work there and even those who try to escape from it, but they try their hand at overcoming this fatigue with the momentum of living narratives. They travel oblique and original trajectories, experimenting with different forms, from storytelling to analysis to narrative reportage. They entrust their interpretation of the city to yellow stories and street stories, missed loves and chased ambitions, palaces and stores, radiographing obscure and lesser-known places, enriching the kaleidoscope of viewpoints, building a compelling, political and courageous reading of one of the most enigmatic and represented cities in Italy. And they show how and why “Naples sparkles, in spite of its difficulties.”